Your Call to Action Isn’t Working, Says Unbounce’s Oli Gardner

According to Unbounce co­founder Oli Gardner “The research I’ve done, and number that I use is that 98 percent of landing experiences from paid marketing is absolute garbage.”

Unbounce has been leading the way for DIY landing page platforms for almost five years. They’ve now decided to take the lead and launch the first ever landing page and optimization conference. The Call To Action Conference will be held Friday, September 12th in Vancouver, British Columbia. This day-­long conference features thought leaders from around the world talking about current and future online marketing trends.

Gardner is still pinching himself that this event is happening. “It’s more and more surreal as it gets real,” he told BetaKit. “We’re seeing a growing buzz at meetups in places like Seattle and Austin, which is really helping set the tone. We saw there’s no convention based conference for this space in Canada, and it needed to happen. It needed to be us to help make it happen.”

When CEO Rick Perreault pitched his company idea for a landing page platform back in 2009, he had many investors scratching their heads. “At the time, landing page marketing and optimization weren’t well adopted,” said Perreault. “Even now we’re still educating marketers on why they shouldn’t send online traffic to their website.”

For Gardner it’s going to be valuable because “a lot of people still don’t realize the importance of having a quality landing page. Overall, in terms of paid marketing it’s not being done well. Our vision is about every business creating a better marketing experience, and more importantly a better customer experience. Business are failing at being strong brands, because they’re not treating people with respect when it comes to clicking through on their ads.”

The conference will focus entirely on actionable marketing strategies that attendees can apply to their own online marketing efforts. Following the conference, Unbounce also has various activities planned for attendees to explore the ‘best of’ Vancouver throughout the weekend.

“The point of this conference is for every session and every panel to be so actionable that there’s massive takeaways for everyone,” said Gardner. “This is a day with a single story arc, and an event for making the call to action a message that achieves results. We want to see more marketers creating delightful experiences for their customers.”

“We’re thrilled to host the inaugural Call to Action Conference in our own backyard” said Perreault. “Bringing this caliber of thought leaders together to deliver actionable advice will be a first for Canada and Unbounce is excited to help marketers level up their skills.”

When you give value, you get value in return. For the Unbounce team generosity is one of their core values. Gardner shared “the first day we started the company was the first day I started as a marketer. We made the decision from day one that our content, information, and courses would be open, shareable, and valuable. We knew it was going to be a huge challenge being marketers, marketing to marketers with marketing content to help do better marketing. If people respect our content, then they’ll have trust in our product.”

Almost five years later, it’s evident those decisions are paying off. Unbounce continues to grow, as highlighted by recently opening a new office in Montreal.

While Gardner will be speaking at the Call To Action Conference, he’s quickly becoming someone who’s in demand globally. He’ll be sharing his expertise at upcoming events this year including,

John Gray is the co-founder and CEO of Mentionmapp. As a writer, John cares about keeping the humanity in our stories and conversations about technology. He has a B.Ap.Sc. in Communications and a B.A. in English, both from Simon Fraser University.